Taxes Done!

I just finished our taxes. It’s the culmination of probably 40 hours of work over the last several weeks, and it feels pretty darn good. I spent $125 to get one hour of consultation from our accountant, but other than that I did it all on my own. I finished the state and federal corporate returns last night, and our personal state and federal returns today. I put an additional $1000 into my IRA for 2007, to get our AGI down below $52,000 (it turned out that I didn’t need to make the contribution after all, because our AGI dipped below the $52K mark with some other changes I made along the way, but the money’s in the IRA now anyway, and we did get an additional deduction for it). So we qualified for a $400 savers credit, which is a nice bonus.

I had wanted to have the corporate returns mailed today and the personal returns e-filed, but I think I’m going to wait until Monday. I’ve spent so much time on them over the last few days that I think it might be a good idea to just leave them alone for a couple days and make sure I don’t think of anything I want to change or add before I file them. The extension I filed for the corporate return gives me 6 more months, and I still have 3 weeks on the personal returns before tax day, so I suppose it’ll be ok to wait a few more days.

Assuming I don’t think of any changes I need to make, we’re going to be getting a $3800 refund. Oops. In the words of our fearless leader, I guess I misunderestimated our taxes last year. I usually try to pay pretty close to what we owe each year, in order to avoid big free loans to the government. But I’d still rather be getting a big refund than be in the boat we were in a few years ago when we owed the IRS $7000 at tax time. Last year was tough, because it was our first year as employees of our corporation, and I wasn’t sure how much our dividends (from which no taxes are withheld, but taxes are still owed) were going to affect things. Also, we ended up contributing more to our HSA than we had thought we would. So all in all, I’m happy with the refund (and it will go straight towards our HSA and my husband’s 2008 IRA). But I’m going to make some changes in our withholdings to make sure that we’re not withholding too much for the rest of this year.